


daybreak and the morning light to come

by indigostohelit



Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Denial of Feelings, Depression, Enemies to Lovers, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Hot Weather, M/M, Mistakes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Phone Sex, Power Dynamics, Topping from the Bottom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 18:13:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16224575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: After Carrillo's death, Javier Peña goes to confront Pacho Herrera about his involvement in los Pepes.This goes very badly for everyone.





	daybreak and the morning light to come

**Author's Note:**

> JESUS CHRIST. Well. Thank you to Austin, whose birthday present this is, and to Michele, whose birthday present this also is, three months later; you are the best people on Earth, and also, you came up with half the scenes. Thanks for encouraging me on this crack-becoming-not-crack ship and being the best ~~and only~~ readers.
> 
> Warnings for: canon-typical violence and drinking/smoking; depictions of depression, including self-destructive decision-making and suicidal ideation (vague and never acted on); death and grief; period-typical homophobia, including slurs; morally ambiguous people having unsafe sex for bad reasons. Also, the weather in Colombia is not like that.
> 
> All characters should be considered to represent their fictional portrayals in Narcos. Translation Convention applies; everyone is speaking Spanish unless otherwise mentioned or Steve. I'm not a native Spanish speaker and welcome advice and corrections. Title from "Old Ways" by The Novel Ideas.

### ONE

“I should be fucking,” says Peña, inhales smoke, hot and sticky and humid, “I could be fucking— _anyone_ else—”

“So fuck someone else,” says Herrera from the bed. Peña tells himself not to turn, and then does it. Herrera is still naked, the bedsheets twisted next to him where Peña was ten minutes ago. In the golden light from the street, his eyes are near-colorless. Peña meets them—tries to meet them, and can only bear a second of that blank, hungry stare before he has to turn his face away.

“Or,” says Herrera, sounding nearly bored, “come over here and make yourself useful. It's up to you.”

That, Peña thinks, grinding out his half-smoked cigarette in the dirt of the windowsill, is precisely the problem.

 

When he and Carrillo were together—

This is not how he wants that thought to start.

When he and Carrillo were—fucking. More than fucking. Whatever it is they were doing, in between Peña's whores and Carrillo's wife. Whatever you call it, when it's two in the morning and the leads have turned up empty and the sky is heavy with waiting rain—whatever you call it when the hours blur together and everything seems outside space, outside time, like it wouldn't matter if the sky split in two and the earth cracked, if Escobar fell dead on the pavement with no one to see him, if Peña turned his face and canted his hips and leaned, just a little, into Carrillo's heat—

He thinks about it, while he's on his knees on Herrera's floor. When he's in Herrera's bed. Closes his eyes and—doesn't _imagine_ , exactly, doesn't _pretend_ , he's a coward and a maricón but he's enough of a goddamn man to know who he's fucking.

But—thinks about it. Remembers, maybe. Wonders, digging his hands into Herrera's hips and panting hard into Herrera's back, if Herrera can tell.

It's likely. It seems likely. Herrera seems to know everything else, after all—where Peña is, where Peña will be, what Peña will say to him before he says it. Who Peña will give him, today, which shipments, which sicarios. Why.

That last might be wishful thinking.

 

Months earlier—years earlier. Time has always been a sieve here, nothing but holes and vanished memories since Peña shouted Carrillo's name through a radio and heard nothing back. Centuries earlier, maybe. Another lifetime.

“Make yourself at home,” Don Berna had said, says, will say. Javi felt—feels—like he's floating through a dream. Feels like, walking down the stairs, he could trip and fall at any moment and not hit the ground; like the animal heads and hanging red velvet curtains are something insubstantial, empty space, candle smoke. Even los Castaños, when they appear, do it in the way figures in dreams appear; _I must have known them once_ , Javi thinks blearily to himself, _when I was a child._ A third-grade classmate, an old bully who his mind has brought back again, a history documentary. A dream Colombia is dreaming herself; a ghost, running up from the land like a river.

When Judy Moncada's heels click towards him, her shadow pooling on the floor, he thinks with total calm that he is about to die.

“Agent Peña,” she says, and raises a glass. “Welcome to Montecasino.”

When he leaves the mansion, hours or years later, a scrap of paper is burning a hole in his pocket. An address on it; a name in his mouth. He can still see the face of that girl on Gabriela's bed, her shoulders narrow and hunched, her mouth pinched. He'd thought—

 _We want Escobar to be afraid_ , Fidel Castaño had said to him. Javi knows fear, understands it like a third language. When he sees it in others, he recognizes it. What he'd seen in that girl—she'd been a mother, she said, and she'd looked so astoundingly young. A woman trying to get out of Colombia, trying to protect her child. Willing to sell out Don Pablo Escobar, willing to do anything. He'd thought of her in Miami, next to Connie. In Laredo.

Berna drops him off by his car. He's miles from the base, deep in Medellín; it's a long way to his bed.

He won't be sleeping anytime soon. Instead of turning towards base, he takes the car out of the city, down south along the highway. The mountains rise around him. It would be so easy to get lost here, to drive himself into the hills and the trees, where no one would ever find him again but the tree rats and termites. To be transformed into a body under a tree, another part of the land.

Christ, if he'd _seen_ it in a gangster movie, he wouldn't have believed it. “Too much stupidity,” he'd said to Don Berna, and meant it—not just Moncada and los Castaños, not just Berna himself, but the whole house, the whole situation. The whole war, maybe. Carrillo's gone and he's taking field trips to narcotraficante mansions. He's never going to see Carrillo again and he's lending cigarettes to Judy fucking Moncada. He's taking information from drug lords and fascists and Horacio Carrillo is—

A piece of paper in his pocket, with the address of a girl who led a man to his death. Who could have led Javi to his. Who must have thought she had.

Ahead of him, the road is all shadows. How did he end up here?

 _With all the information in the world,_ Judy Moncada had said, _you still have to be a policeman._

He takes the next exit onto the north highway. The night sky is high above him, hemmed in by the hills, scattered with pale brown clouds. He feels—sober, sober and sick, his jaw tight. The air in the car is too-hot, full of dust.

How _did_ he end up here? Tonight, of all nights, when he had wanted nothing more than to be drunk and alone with his own ghosts—how had Moncada and los Castaños and Berna convinced themselves to bring him to Montecasino? What had they said to each other, in some room of that mansion, days or weeks ago? With American technology, and fascist violence, and narco intelligence— a contradiction in terms if he ever heard one, there's only two narcos in Colombia with a scrap of brain, and one of them is in some safehouse in the jungle gloating over a murder, and the other—

Blood rushes in his ears. It takes him a few moments to understand why.

“All he's got to worry about,” Carrillo had said, years ago, when Escobar had been twice as trapped and half as desperate, a god in his own cathedral, “is the Cali cartel—”

Javi inhales.

Exhales.

A street sign whips past him. He's miles south of Medellín, far from Search Bloc. He doesn't know when he'll be back to his own room, able to sleep. He doesn't know if he'll sleep tonight.

The highway is empty. He lifts his foot off the gas pedal, coasts gently to a stop. Feels the ghosts of a hundred thousand cars, hurling themselves past him; a moment of sickening, unnatural stillness. Perfect balance.

Then he shoves the steering wheel all the way around to the left and slams his foot down. The car begins to circle, stuttering and skidding.

It's a long way to Herrera's mansion. He'll need to drive fast.

 

There's a lot of things he can't remember—can't manage to, can't bring himself to—years later, when he's trying to arrange his own thoughts. The drive through that night is one of them. It's possible that there are other cars on the road; it's possible that he looks at a map, thinks his route through. Compares it against what Steve remembers of his kidnapping, what he knows about Herrera's habits and the Cali cartel's movements.

What he remembers, though, is none of these. What he remembers is the road, swerving ahead in spurts of shadow. The occasional flash of headlights. The great curve of the sky, deep grey clouds and stars swelling above him like water on a penny; the silhouette of the hills watching patiently from his right. Insects and night birds, singing him south, a rhythmless, meaningless lullaby.

When he gets there, the house is dark. He rolls to a stop on a long driveway, slams the car door behind him. Doesn't bother to lock it. On the gravel, his footsteps sound strangely loud. He feels shockingly, uncomfortably alive—conscious of his own breath, of the blood in his veins and the beating of his heart.

He expected someone bigger than the man standing in front of the door: a giant, maybe, some hulking thing from a gangster movie. Instead, he's about Javi's age, about Javi's height. A little younger, hair a little curlier. Shifting from foot to foot, restless, like he'd rather be anywhere else.

Javi—means to shoot him. Doesn't mean to leave him alive. Doesn't mean to _fight_ him, what is he, Bruce fucking Lee, but he knocks him out anyway, breaks his nose and leaves him bleeding on the doorstep. The kid yells before he goes down, which Javi ignores. When he tries the door, it's unlocked.

There's a hallway; there's a living room, with gauzy curtains, a coffee table, a thick carpet that muffles his shoes. Farther into the house, the sound of footsteps down a flight of stairs, unhurried. Someone's coming. Javi eases his gun out from his waistband, lets it rest at his side.

“Agent Peña,” says Herrera. Javi can't quite see him—he's a shadow in the doorway, on the other side of the coffee table.

“Pacho Herrera,” he says.

Herrera moves forward, into the light. He looks composed, comfortable; he's wearing a tight black cotton shirt and what Javi suspects are silk boxers. “I'm pleased to meet you at last,” he says. “Though for some reason I don't recall inviting you.”

“We have enough information to know where you live,” says Javi. Now that Herrera is in front of him, his handsome face cool and blank, his vision seems to narrow to a point. His ears are roaring. “You kidnapped Steve, we figured it out. We're going to have you pinned on a map.”

“What a shame,” says Herrera. “I liked this house.”

“Yeah, well,” says Javi, steps forward and around the coffee table, uses the weight of his body to knock Herrera to the side, pushes him against a wall before he can get his balance back, slaps a hand over his mouth, and while Herrera's trying to squirm away, he shoves his gun into Herrera's gut, just under his ribs. “If you scream, I'll shoot you.”

He waits until Herrera blinks affirmation, and then lets Herrera's mouth go.

“You're very straightforward, aren't you,” says Herrera.

“You're not,” says Javi. Herrera barely looks ruffled, the asshole; if anything, he looks _interested_. He digs the gun in a little harder, for the sake of seeing Herrera wince, and wishes it wasn't a relief. “You tried to set me up.”

Herrera raises his eyebrows. “Did I?”

“I know you sent Don Berna,” Javi says. “Judy Moncada, the Castaños. I know you're behind them.”

“Oh, _that_ ,” says Herrera, dismissive. The audacity of it is momentarily stunning enough that Javi shifts his weight back; when Herrera immediately tries to slide away to the left, he slaps his free hand to the wall, next to Herrera's neck.

Herrera looks at it, then at him, and tilts his head thoughtfully. Javi is suddenly and unpleasantly aware of the extra few inches Herrera has on him—not because he thinks it'll give Herrera any serious advantage if it comes to a fight, but because he has to look up at Herrera, just a little, and because Herrera definitely knows it. He shifts his weight closer, aiming for threatening, and feels his mouth pinch when Herrera's eyes crinkle at the corners.

“It's fair to say I have some investment in their project,” Herrera says. “But the idea that I _set you up_ —I assumed our interests coincided, Agent Peña.” He shrugs slightly, his shoulder brushing Javi's thumb. “Should I assume instead that you turned them down?”

It takes Javi a few seconds too long to find a response. Herrera, to his credit, doesn't smile, though Javi can see it in his eyes. He snaps, eventually, “I'm not Cali's fucking errand boy.”

“Far from it,” says Herrera, glancing pointedly down at the gun. “Carlos Castaño, though, he's our—errand boy. Fidel, too. You told them so, I assume.”

Christ, if only Herrera would look _scared_ —if only he would talk shit, try to throw his weight around, offer Javi a bribe. Instead, he looks relaxed, as if there's nowhere he'd rather be than trapped between Javi's hand and Javi's gun in his stomach and Javi's face an inch away from his own. Calm, like they're talking about football, or the weather in Medellín.

“Carlos Castaño thinks he's working for his own interests,” Javi says. “He's stupid enough to.”

“You, though, Agent Peña,” says Herrera. “You're not stupid.” He sounds—amused.

Javi clenches his jaw. “Smart enough to figure out who the guy is pulling my strings,” he says.

“Yes,” says Herrera, “you certainly are. And that's why you came here, hours after midnight.” His eyes are crinkled again. “Without your partner. Without telling anyone,” he shifts against the wall, “where you were going.” The silence stretches; Herrera is smiling, now. “Agent Peña. Am I wrong?”

Javi blinks at him. The tunnel vision from a little while ago seems to have reversed itself: he can see, suddenly, every shadow. Hear every noise—the creak of floorboards under his feet, the insects singing outside, the thump of Herrera's heart in his ribcage. The distance between him and Herrera's front door, the length of that gravel driveway; the size of Colombia, its highways and mountains, and himself in the middle of it. Herrera's body, Herrera's breath against his lips. The distance between himself and any living soul who might come to his aid.

“You aren't going to kill me,” he says. It sounds absurd to his own ears.

Herrera breathes in, out, the gun moving against his stomach. “Your bosses would think it was Pablo Escobar,” he says. His tone is friendly. “The benefit of cultivating a different kind of reputation. We wouldn't even need to drive your car back to Medellín. You say Agent Murphy told you where I live? It doesn't matter. No one is going to look for you.”

He reaches down and wraps his hand around the barrel of the gun. When he clicks the safety on and slides it down, pointing towards the floor, Peña doesn't resist.

Herrera smiles at him again, very gently. “So,” he says. “I should assume you didn't say no to Judy Moncada.”

Peña says nothing. He feels—disconnected. Like he's a machine that's been unplugged, like some incomprehensible and vital mechanism inside him is coming at last to a stop. He hasn't moved his hand from next to Herrera's face, hasn't moved his body back from Herrera's body. He feels as if he's forgotten how.

“Well,” says Herrera, his voice seeming to come from a great distance, “I can't assume you have any interest in being Cali's errand boy. Frankly, I would have assumed the opposite.”

Peña thinks, very slowly, that he almost sounds as if—

He blinks. Focuses. Herrera's cocked his head at him, curious, like a bird.

That loose, unmoored feeling is swelling up in his chest again, the sense of being the only thing alive in the hills. As if he could drive for hours, north and further north, and find no cities, no buildings; as if the world has lost its gravity, and if he doesn't find something to grab onto, there'll be nothing but him and the darkness, wet and hot and waiting, the inside of an animal's mouth. The darkness, and the distant stars.

An inch from his face, Herrera's eyes are glittering. Peña stares at him.

And thinks, clearly and calmly, _I killed Horacio Carrillo. There is nothing worse I can do._

He leans in, the stone of the wall flat and cool against his palm, and fits his mouth to Herrera's.

He doesn't know what he expects; to be shoved back, to be shot. What he gets is Herrera kissing him slowly, languidly, like he has all the time in the world. Passive; gentle, almost.

Peña drops the gun and pushes his body forward, pressing Herrera back against the wall. Herrera sighs into his mouth contentedly, and shifts his hips up and open to let Peña work a thigh between his legs; when Peña reaches down to Herrera's crotch, Herrera pulls his mouth away, making a pleased noise. He's hard under his zipper, where Peña is palming him, but he's barely thrusting up; when he kisses at the corner of Peña's mouth, by his ear, it's almost sweet.

Peña wants, very suddenly, to hit something. He drops to his knees.

He's sucked cock before, though he's tried not to make a habit of it; tried not to make a habit of any of this, tried to remind himself of the hundred things that could happen and do happen to men who do what he does and want what he wants. But he feels, now, like he had on the highway: that sensation of not motion but the ghost of motion, of rushing at impossible speed towards an exit that can't possibly exist. He wants to scream, to split open along his edges, to wrench his steering wheel towards the edge of the road and not look at what's waiting for him there.

Instead, he knocks his gun to the side with his knee and pulls down Herrera's boxers. Herrera helps him, working them over his hips and down his thighs—Christ, they're tight—and guiding his head forward. He still looks so goddamn calm. Peña closes his eyes and swallows him down.

It's a blur after that. He remembers it, later, in flashes and sense-images: Herrera's hands in his hair, the stuttering hitch of his hips—Herrera's body, his chest, the join of his shoulder and neck—before Peña can get Herrera to come in his mouth, Herrera's mouth on his own, on his stomach. His hand on Peña's cock—

—being the one against the wall, the stone scraping along his back. Herrera's eyelashes fanned like an inkstain on his cheeks, his hands framing Peña's hips, his mouth like a vise. Peña trying not to thrust up and up into that heat, unable to stop himself—

—at some point, Peña on the coffee table, Herrera's fingers in between his legs, pushing inside him, Peña's legs spreading without his wanting them to. His breath tight in his lungs. Something raw and awful in his face when he meets Herrera's eyes.

Herrera pulls his fingers out. Peña gasps in a breath, and tries not to feel like he's falling into space. Herrera bends over him, and kisses at his hip, and doesn't look at his face again.

When it's over, he finds himself on the carpet. Herrera is lying in front of him, propped up on one elbow. He's watching Peña, his pale eyes cool.

Peña looks away, scrabbles along the floor until he finds his gun. Herrera's eyes track it; when Peña shoves it in his waistband, painfully aware of where Herrera's fingers were, the corner of his mouth curls up.

He purses his lips, draws in a breath. Before he can speak, Peña is pushing himself up and away, moving through the doorway and down the hall to the front of the house. Walking fast, head down, not looking behind him. He's not running. He's trying not to run.

Outside, the night air slams into him, hot and thick. His shirt is sticking to his chest. Going down the driveway feels like wading through water.

He makes it almost all the way to his car, and then looks back anyway. The house is dark. Herrera isn't chasing him.

 

He lasts two days.

The sky is pale with pollution where it meets the distant hills. Against his back, the car door is a pattern of heat, nearly intense enough for pain. Not quite. Javi shifts his cigarette down the pinch of his fingers, lets the pads rest at the edge of the filter, watches the cloud of dust grow where Herrera's car is coming to meet him.

He doesn't think he's slept more than a few hours. Once, when a high school friend had turned twenty-one, they'd driven to Las Vegas, miles of rising and falling mesas and the air conditioner failing in fits and starts until the city had risen up, glittering, like a riptide from the desert. The past days—weeks, months—have been like that: a casino filled with sweet smoke. He can't seem to find what time it is. Can't seem to find his way to the exit.

He shifts his hips against the car. They twinge again, a bright stripe of pain along his thighs. Herrera's car slows, stops.

He expects Herrera to climb out and glare at him, laugh at him, point a gun at him, kill him. Instead, the window creaks down. He can't see Herrera's face behind the windshield, under the sun-glare, but he hears him say, “The door's unlocked.”

Peña grinds out his cigarette in the dust and peels himself away from the metal at his back. The door handle is nearly too hot to touch. When he sits, even the fabric of the passenger seat burns a little on his skin where his shirt rides up. He says, not looking at Herrera, “I have—a location. A safehouse.”

“For Medellín?” says Herrera. He sounds—surprised.

For a moment, Peña doesn't understand, turns and looks at him blankly. Feels his cheeks go hot a second before he thinks it consciously.

“I'm not,” he says, fumbles for the door.

“You're not,” says Herrera.

“Once,” says Peña. He's pulling at the door handle; it isn't moving. “Once was—a mistake, I—making a deal is one thing–” The door's stuck, broken in some way; he tugs, tugs–

Herrera's arm is across him. Is trapping him in his seat. He pulls, gently, and the door springs open.

Peña knows he shouldn't, and turns his head to meet Herrera's eyes anyway. Herrera hasn't moved his arm.

“Then give me the safehouse,” he says. He pulls back his body at last, and reaches into his jacket pocket for a cigarette of his own. “And do me a favor.”

In the thick heat of the car, Peña feels suddenly, unaccountably cold. He says, “What do you want me to do?”

When he dares to look, Herrera is half-smiling around the cigarette, his eyes on the lighter in his hand. “Next time, Agent Peña,” he says, “don't tease me.”

Peña inhales. Exhales.

He closes Herrera's door. When he pulls the passenger seatbelt over his chest, the buckle is just hot enough to hurt.

“Do you sleep with all your informants?” Elisa had asked him once, years ago.

Now, he presses Herrera into the mattress, mouths along his jaw. Herrera shudders underneath him, moans. Urges Peña into him, rakes his nails down his back.

Peña's slept with whores; Peña's slept with men and women he's picked up at bars, with men and women he's liked, with men and women who are giving him information. Peña has, very rarely, slept with people he's loved.

This isn't like any of those.

Herrera straddles him, eases down onto Peña's cock, splays his fingers on Peña's shoulder and grinds his hips. Herrera waits for him on his couch, spreads his legs and lets Peña settle between them. Herrera meets him at bars, walks him outside into alleys, pulls Peña in to mouth at Herrera's neck and rock desperately against his leg.

Peña expects all sorts of things from him. Expects to be—hit, maybe, to walk into base with bruises on his face or his neck. To have his face fucked, his hands tied. To be thrown against walls, onto the floor, to have it hurt when Herrera touches him. To—he remembers, once, a naked man strung up in a stone-walled room, and Carrillo moving softly through a sunbeam, holding in his hand a sharp little knife–

Instead, Herrera is—strangely gentle. Runs his hands through Peña's hair; strokes fingers down Peña's cheek, while Peña is blowing him. Kisses Peña's chest, bites at his thighs. Hardly ever leaves marks, and only once where it shows. Watches Peña from under his eyelashes, careful and calculating. Gentle even when he's coming in Peña's mouth, on Peña's chest, on Peña's face. He hasn't even fucked him.

It seems like he's almost being—careful with Peña.

Which is insane.

 _Do you sleep with all your informants?_ He doesn't sleep with Maritza. He sees Elisa in her, a little, her pale, suspicious face, the desperation in it, and likes it no better than seeing Connie. When he tails Limón from his meeting with her to a house in the hills, sees Velasco's bald head poke out of a building and pull in again, he thinks of Elisa in Connie's car. Thinks of Elisa in his bed.

 _Do you sleep with all your informants?_ He calls Don Berna, but it's Herrera who takes his face in his hands later that night, after Velasco's been taken by Berna and los Castaños to somewhere he doesn't want to know about, and kisses him like he's drinking him in. It's Herrera who lays him down on a bed in a safehouse in Medellín, crawls between his legs and sucks his cock for hours while Peña bucks and groans above him and tries desperately not to beg. It's Herrera who finds him not far from Search Bloc the next morning, drives Peña back to his house and lets Peña fuck him like he's dying for it, gripping at Herrera's shoulders and burying his face in Herrera's neck.

 _Do you sleep with all your informants?_ Through the window, he watches a stray dog trot down the street, its lean body shaking like a leaf. Stubs out his cigarette on the windowsill, breathes in the humidity, and turns to look at the bed.

“Agent Peña?” says Herrera, and looks at him, still colorless, still hungry. Blinks at Peña slowly, like a cat.

Peña thinks, dully and without conviction, that maybe he should be asking Herrera that question.

He wakes the next morning. Goes to work; meets Steve there. In the center of the city, something dangling. A little bloated, a little pale. Beginning to smell. Velasco. Velasco's corpse.

“Signed,” he reads aloud, “los Pepes.”

Steve is looking at him. Javi, despite knowing there's no connection between him and the stiffening body, despite _knowing_ he's safe, he must be safe, feels his heart start to hammer.

Steve says, “Who the hell are los Pepes?”

The first time he had seen someone die, it hadn't been police work. No assassination, no narco plot. Nothing so out of the ordinary. It had been, in fact, nearly mundane: his grandmother on her bed at the back of Javi's house, under the thin blue blanket the hospital had lent them to make her comfortable.

He remembers:

His grandmother saying to him, “Come over here, it's not contagious,” and laughing at him. He'd tried to hear the cancer in the laugh, a faintness, a gasping. Instead, it had just sounded like his abuela's voice. And afterwards he had thought that, anyway, the cancer wasn't just in the lungs, hadn't been for months, and he might as well have tried to see it in her thin hands, in the whites of her eyes, in the wet kiss she had planted on Javi's cheek.

He remembers his grandmother beckoning over the nurse the hospital had sent and whispering in her ear; and how the nurse had told them, quietly, to leave the room, and his mother and father had looked ashamed, and how the nurse had gone to the bedside table and put on her white sterile gloves. And Javi had felt ashamed, too, though he didn't yet understand why; and they had stood in their kitchen, not looking at each other, until the bedroom door had opened and the nurse had beckoned them back in and passed them in the hallway with her little plastic bag on her way to the bathroom, peeling off her gloves as she went, and they all went back in and clustered around the bed and pretended they didn't notice the smell.

And he remembers how, a week later, after dinner while his grandmother was sleeping, someone had noticed that her oxygen mask wasn't clouding over. And the nurse had already gone home for the night, and his mother had run out to the kitchen to call her, and Javi had sat on his chair by his grandmother's side and listened to the oxygen tank click and rattle next to him. Abuela Rosalía hadn't woken up. Her lips were a little open. There were hairs on her chin and around her mouth. Javi looked at them, lying white against her skin.

Half an hour later, the nurse came. She looked at the oxygen mask, and then listened to his grandmother's chest with her stethoscope. Then she disconnected the oxygen tank, and went out to the kitchen to talk with Javi's mother and father.

Javi had expected a dead body to be horrifying, or disgusting. It was neither. A little ugly, maybe. Most of all, he expected it to be—different than before; a corpse, a cadaver, a carcass. He'd expected the curtains to blow, or the lights to flicker. Something to show that death had come, and left again, bearing something with it.

It hadn't happened. Death had taken nothing away. His abuela was in the room with him, lying on the bed, and she was dead. It was like seeing a mouse that his cat had brought to the doorstep. It was like visiting her while she was sleeping every day of the last week. There was nothing inhuman about her body, nothing that turned it from a person into a _thing_ ; it was the same woman who had written grocery lists in scrawling, incomprehensible handwriting and made buñuelos in the kitchen, but she had stopped breathing, and the skin was beginning to stretch taut over her face.

He got up and went out to the kitchen, where the nurse was packing up her bag. His father and his mother had their arms around each other. When his mother saw Javi in the doorway, she reached out for him, too, and he let himself be pulled into her embrace, into the dark, tight warmth of her feeling. There was nowhere else to go.

 

### TWO

Herrera is waiting for him by the glittering blue pool, a white bathrobe wrapped around him. It barely covers his thighs.

“What now,” says Peña, “you make me a passionfruit daiquiri?”

Herrera looks startled for a moment, then laughs. “Agent Murphy. I remember.”

“Yeah, well,” says Peña, “so does he. Being kidnapped will do that.”

Herrera smiles a small smile, his eyes narrowed, looking into some distant past. “He has a wife,” he says. “Doesn't he.”

“In America,” Peña says sharply.

“No,” says Herrera, “you mistake me. I'm saying I misjudged his feelings.” He's mixing something clear and bubbly at the bar. That small smile isn't quite gone from his face. “What I mean is that I told Navegante to take the wrong DEA agent.”

Peña says, “Oh, for God's sake.”

“A buen fin no hay mal principio,” says Herrera, philosophical. He's begun to mix a second drink. “After all, you came to us willingly.”

He settles in the chair beside Peña, while Peña's still trying to find a response, and sets one of the glasses in front of him. Peña drums his fingers on the table, one-two-three-four, and considers it. Then he leans over, reaches under the table, and slides his hand up Herrera's knee to his thigh.

He feels the breath leave Herrera's body, more than seeing it. When he looks up, Herrera's eyes are dark, his smile still twitching at the edges of his lips. Peña's heart is hammering hard.

“Steve Murphy never did this,” he says.

“No,” says Herrera, “he did not.”

Peña isn't entirely sure what he expects to find under Herrera's bathrobe—a bathing suit, a pair of boxers. What he finds is Herrera's cock, hard and growing harder under his hand, already slick at the tip.

He rubs at the head, light. Herrera leans back, his eyes closed, and makes a satisfied noise deep in his throat.

“A little harder,” he says. “With your thumb. There—yes. Perfect.”

Something unexpectedly hot and angry spikes low in Peña's gut. Herrera's eyelashes are fluttering onto his cheeks. His shoulders are relaxed, his whole body one long line of loose contentment. As if there's nothing he'd rather be doing than sitting here by his swimming pool, in his mansion, with his drink, while an American agent jacks him off. The little pleasures of a Sunday morning.

“You should fuck me,” he says, to see what Herrera will say.

“Hm,” says Herrera, and raises his eyebrows without opening his eyes. “You should fuck me, Agent Peña.”

Peña wants to argue, and doesn't know why. Instead, he stands up. Herrera shivers a little when he lets go of his cock, and his eyes flutter open. When he looks up at Peña, he's smiling. Peña would call his expression warm, if it were on anyone else's face.

“I am glad you came to us, you know,” he says.

“Right,” says Peña.

Herrera hums, stands and reaches down to Peña's crotch. “Not just because you're a good fuck,” he says mildly. “Though you certainly are.”

“Thanks,” Peña says. He tries to make it dry, but he's abruptly short of breath. “Do you want to go up to your bed at all, or are you just planning to have me— _fuck_ —to have me give it to you out here in your courtyard?”

“I don't see why I shouldn't,” says Herrera. God, Peña has gotten hard embarrassingly fast. “No one is here who I don't want to be. It's my house, isn't it? My courtyard?” Peña hears the unspoken end of the sentence, and feels his face go hot. He doesn't know what to do with it, the anger still roiling inside him. There's nowhere for it to go.

He backs Herrera up against the bar, and spreads Herrera open with his fingers, and watches Herrera's face as he fucks him, the curve of his smile, the gold in his eyes. A man utterly at home in his own skin; a man who turns any room he walks through into his territory. He's never seen him miss a beat, never seen him off-balance. He has no idea what Herrera looks like when he's angry.

God, what could he possibly do to get Herrera angry?

Herrera sighs after he comes, and stretches, the streaks shiny on his stomach. The light from the swimming pool is playing across his face, turning it into something wild and unnatural, a work of art, a mask.

“Really, Agent Peña,” he says, “I am grateful.”

Peña stares at him. When Herrera opens his eyes, he looks away, bites the inside of his cheek hard.

“My pleasure,” he says bitterly, and goes to find his clothes.

 

He gets up. He goes to work. He comes home. He falls asleep. He chases Horacio Carrillo down the streets of Medellín, watches them turn into a maze around him, the alleys long and wandering, the lights flickering gold and blue in the hills below, Carrillo just out of reach. He screams Carrillo's name through the radio, and listens to no one answering him. He gets up. He goes to work. He chases narcos through streets, up hills, in his car down narrow and winding roads. Around each corner, Carrillo's body bleeds to death seconds before he arrives. He comes home. He falls asleep again.

Jairo disappears. He watches Martínez's face, still and solemn, in a little room in a little house with a woman whose little life has just crumbled around her, and shoves his way out the door. “It bothers you,” he says to Steve, “look into it.” And if Steve looks into it—then he'll find something. Or he won't. There's something freeing in giving up his fate to—Steve's intelligence, to God, to the DEA, to whatever saint drew the short straw to watch over cops and traitors. Something freeing in giving up the idea that any of this is under his control.

It's one of those years where smoke clings in the air, crawls along the humidity like a termite on bark. All the city needs is a rainstorm—thunder to shake out the sky like a blanket, lightning to bleach it clean. If only a rainstorm would come.

He can feel in his gut that the raid on Blackie will go wrong. But he's felt in his gut that so many things will go wrong, lately, every raid and informant and piece of intelligence for the past month and more—if he said _stop_ every time he felt a bad feeling he'd never get out of bed in the morning, and God knows he doesn't need one more reason to do that.

Nevertheless, looking at Martínez's son shiver in front of Carlos Castaño's gun, his face all brave and innocent, like he'd never really believed he could get shot before, he takes a moment to be furious at himself. After all, nobody else is taking the time to be furious at him.

“What,” he hisses at Carlos Castaño, “you wanna kill each other at checkpoint?” And waits, briefly, for Castaño to answer _yes_.

When Castaño lowers the gun, relief is unexpected and unwelcome. He touches Martínez's son's shoulder, his face, still nearly believing he'll feel it cold and sticky with blood. Next to him, Steve's mouth twists, and Javi doesn't meet his eyes.

Steve is still frowning back at the station, hesitating over the phone. His jaw works back and forth.

“When were you gonna tell–” he says, and then stops, and sighs.

“Let's go out,” he says. “Grab a drink.”

Javi's stomach sinks. Grabbing his coat from over his chair, he follows Steve out the door.

The bar they end up at isn't one of the ones he used to go to with Carrillo; it's a little nicer, the beer a little worse. The staff let Steve order in English, which is something the rest of the city is starting to learn to give him shit for. Javi grabs two crappy beers from the bartender and wends his way back to the table Steve's staked out for them, slides one across from Steve.

Steve looks—exhausted. Not like he did when Connie left him—nothing has been as bad as that, nothing since, thank God—but he's folded over the table, his chin on his fist. He looks up at Javi, rubs his hand over his mouth.

“You know I've got your back, Javi,” he says.

“You too,” says Javi, automatic, and then registers what Steve is trying to tell him, and sits down hard.

“You know,” he says.

“I had a guess,” says Steve. He isn't looking at Javi.

“Not just about,” Javi says, and feels his face go hot; if Steve doesn't know there's more to know than that Javi has been working with los Pepes, he certainly does now.

“Not just about,” Steve confirms. He's going red, too, at the tips of his ears, hard to see in the dimness of the bar. “Javi—you came in once with a hickey.”

“Could've been from a whore,” says Javi. The bar's crowded, no one's listening to them, they're not even speaking Spanish. It wouldn't matter if they were. Doesn't matter anything, now that Steve—Jesus Christ. Steve _knows_.

“Could've,” says Steve. “Didn't prove anything. I knew you were–” He gestures expressively. “Sometimes. It didn't matter—it didn't, honest to God, you kept it quiet and you kept it professional, that's all I could ask for. I figured, after you lost Carrillo, everybody's got the right to get away with something. You let me get away with plenty.” He shakes his head. “But you started making phone calls. I started wondering about—timing, about where you were when things were happening. I'm a cop, Javi.” He pauses. “You work in a station full of cops. Even the dirty ones.”

Now Javi can't meet his eyes. He says, staring at the salt crystals scattered across the table, “So then who else knows?”

“I don't know. No one,” says Steve, and then, when Javi looks up, sharp and disbelieving, “About you and your new friend Carlos Castaño—I don't know. Martínez is pretty sure, I think, even if he's not gonna do anything about it. Messina doesn't know, but she's about a second away from guessing. About you and–” He visibly cuts himself off, takes a long pull from his beer. “Jesus Christ. You know he _kidnapped_ me, Javi.”

“I know,” says Javi. “I _know_.”

“He said,” says Steve, “he wasn't gonna make me or you cross any lines we hadn't already crossed.” He looks at Javi, his expression flat. “Were you? Then?”

“No!” says Javi. “Jesus, no. Only after–” A beat. “The ambush.”

Steve's eyes go soft, and Javi loves him and hates him for it. “When—los Pepes started,” he pushes on, unwilling to let Steve say anything to that, “when my—source contacted me, I went down to his place. I meant to.” He shakes his head. “Arrest him. Kill him. I don't know.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Steve, again, rubs a hand over his eyes. “You know I'm not going to tell Martínez or Messina. I'm not gonna sell you out. But if you fuck up, if you really fuck up—I don't know how far I'm gonna be able to cover you.”

“You're not gonna have to cover me,” says Javi. He wants, abruptly, to be drinking something stronger than shitty thousand-peso beer. “I have it under control.”

“Yeah,” says Steve. “It looks like you have it under control.”

Javi looks at his face for a second, and then looks away. The bar is dark, the streetlights faded in the windows like stained glass.

“I'm not,” he says, pushes his fingers over the peeling label of his beer. “I'm not doing it because I think it's a, a good idea. I'm not doing this because I think it's—he's—good for me.”

The paper peels off the glass in one long, wet strip. He works it in between his fingers. “Have you ever,” he says, “been driving on a mountain, and some little voice in your head says— _Drive off the cliff_.”

“Yeah,” says Steve. “You know I have.”

“Right,” says Javi. “And you're not gonna do it, and you know you're not gonna do it, and you keep driving, but—just for a second—you speed up the car. Just push on the gas pedal a little, and go around the next turn a little too fast. Just because—you're not gonna. But if you're not gonna do it, you've gotta do _something_.”

He lets out a breath, and takes a swallow of the beer. “So,” he says. “I'm not gonna fuck up the—the job. I'm not gonna do anything stupid. Stupider than I've already done. But I've gotta do something.”

There's a brief silence. Around them, the sound of the bar swells and stills.

“Javi,” says Steve, “how the hell do you think all this is going to end?”

Javi opens his mouth, and shuts it again. What's on his tongue isn't words, but a picture: the flickering streetlights, the shifting shadows. Carrillo's body on the ground.

“I don't know,” he says, instead.

Steve leans back in his chair, runs his thumb thoughtfully around the mouth of the bottle. Javi doesn't know if he likes the way he's looking at him.

“I hope you know what you're doing,” he says.

Javi looks away. “Don't worry,” he says. “It's not gonna blow back on you.”

Steve says, “It's not me I'm worried about.”

 

When he arrives at the door of Herrera's mansion, later that week, Herrera isn't at the door to meet him. He goes in anyway, not meeting the eyes of the man standing there, and finds Herrera in one of the endless sitting rooms, tapping ash into a little crystal tray. It's hard to make out his eyes through the smoke around him, at first. When it clears, Herrera isn't looking at him, but out the window, onto the rolling grounds. His mouth is tight.

Peña pauses in the door. It's too late, though—Herrera hears his footsteps, turns and looks at him. His expression doesn't change.

“Agent Peña,” he says, and gets up. Peña takes an involuntary step back; Herrera notices, raises an eyebrow. “Let me make you a drink.”

Peña sinks into one of the chairs as Herrera busies himself by the drinks cabinet, bearing a thick bottle and two glasses to the side table. He doesn't want to say what he came to say. “Look,” he says, anyway. “You should know. Los Castaños came by one of our checkpoints. Carlos pointed a gun at the leader of Search Bloc's son. I talked him down, but—I talked him down. In front of people.”

Herrera puts his cigarette to his lips, the ember flaring briefly, and exhales. “I see,” he says. “That's interesting information, Agent Peña. Thank you for letting me know.”

Peña stares at him. “Yeah,” he says. “No problem. What the fuck, do you think I'm going to stick my head on the chopping block for Judy Moncada?”

Herrera smiles. It doesn't reach his hot, hard eyes. “For Judy Moncada? I hope not.”

“Or for,” says Peña, and can't finish the way he intends to. “For _anyone_.”

“It seems to me like you've already done it,” says Herrera, swirls his drink. “And like it's your job to take your head off again. In the meantime, the strategy's changed. We want to expand our scope.”

“My job to take my—our _scope_ ,” says Peña. This conversation has spun out of control very quickly. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“We've been targeting sicarios, labs, shipments,” says Herrera. “Escobar is still breathing. It's not good enough.” Another orange flare, another cloud of smoke. He sounds practiced, like this is a speech he's been rehearsing in his head. “We want you to give Don Berna and los Castaños lower-level men. Informants, drivers. Secretaries.” He shakes his head. “It doesn't matter. Anyone who's worked for him has to know the price.”

“Right,” says Peña. “No.”

Herrera still isn't looking at him. “We're not interested in holding back any more,” he says.

“That's my problem,” says Peña, “I don't like this _we_. I'm not here to make money for the Cali cartel, Pacho. If you want to kill Escobar, I'm—fine, I'm helping you kill Escobar. But–”

“Then _help us kill Escobar_ ,” says Herrera, and looks at him at last. His eyes look—red, strangely tired. “If you can't manage to get yourself out of trouble with the Americans, fine. But when I tell you the strategy's changed–”

“I don't take orders from you,” Peña snaps. “I'm not your gun, I don't jump at your say-so. If you don't like that, I don't have to be here–”

“Then _leave_ ,” says Herrera, tightly, and puts the glass down so hard whiskey slops over the edge and onto the table.

Peña stares at him, breathing hard. He can see, now, a smear of dust across Herrera's forehead, just under his hair. The tightness in his face; the way his knuckles are white around his glass.

“Something happened,” he says.

Herrera blinks at him and, for the first time that night, seems to see him. His throat works; he lets out a breath.

“A death in the family,” he says. “Well. Several deaths.” He picks up the bottle and pours again, carefully. “None that you need to concern yourself with.”

“None that I need to— _concern myself_ with,” says Peña flatly. “But enough that you want me to get in deeper with your—with los Castaños. Draw the attention of my bosses at Search Bloc even more than I already have.”

A brief pause. “A bomb went off,” says Herrera, “at Gilberto's daughter's wedding.” He drains the glass and pours again. “Escobar.”

Peña looks at him. “So this is about revenge.”

Herrera laughs, harsh and short. “And for you it isn't.”

Peña goes still. Herrera's never brought up—he knows Herrera must know. Must have put together the timing, even if no one's told him he and Carrillo had been—that Peña had cared about him. He hadn't thought Herrera was being— _kind._ Polite, maybe. Mannerly. A gentleman of Cali.

Some of what he's thinking must show on his face. Whatever it is, it makes the tension in Herrera's shoulders unwind. He puts the glass down, taps his lips with one finger, his expression thoughtful. Maybe even a little sorry.

“You need to let go of the idea that you're not—attached,” he says.

“What do you mean?” says Peña warily, He's a little less angry, now, but anger is still banked inside his chest, ready to flare.

“You think you're not suited for this,” says Herrera. “For working on the other side of the line.” He shrugs a shoulder. “I disagree.”

“Believe me,” says Peña, “thinking I'm too good for you is _not_ the problem.”

“Who said anything about _good_?” says Herrera. He looks at Peña, his eyes glinting. “No,” he says, “no, Agent Peña, your problem is that you think you're a tourist. You're having your fun with the cartels, you'll have a story to tell your wife one day, but you don't really _belong_ here. You belong with the Search Bloc. You belong with the Americans. And when it comes time for you to make your excuses and walk away, it'll be easy for you. You'll be as clean as the day you came in.”

He reaches out, strokes down Peña's arm, soft. Peña can feel his skin pebbling up where his fingers have been.

He catches Herrera's hand hovering over his shoulder. “I'm not dirty,” he says.

“No?” says Herrera, and slips out of Peña's grasp to start undoing the top button of his shirt. “Let's see if we can't fix that.”

 

Peña shouldn't be downstairs. Then again, Peña shouldn't be doing a lot of things.

Still, he knows better. There's—Jesus Christ—a routine; he waits until the coast is clear, until Herrera tells him the coast is clear, and walks Peña across his courtyard in broad view of the moon and God and his stupid little artisanal plants to Peña's car. Where Peña starts the engine, and drives away, and tries not to think about whether Herrera is watching him go.

Herrera, though, is behind the house now. There'd been a phone call; Peña had tried to convince himself not to go and eavesdrop, and then tried to convince himself the reason he wasn't doing it was because it wasn't safe. Then, at long last, he had peeled himself out of Herrera's bedsheets, shrugged his jacket over his shoulders, and padded down Herrera's staircase to the front door.

In Laredo, the nights turn on you; the heat flees from the land like gas from a balloon, leaving the air crisp and cold and the sky clean. Down here, though, warmth lingers, presses heavy at the back of Peña's neck like a tongue. Far behind him, the near-inaudible hum of Herrera's voice pauses. He reaches into his jeans pocket for his keys.

A voice from the darkness says, “Sir?”

Javi has his gun out of his waistband and pointed towards the noise long before his brain catches up with his hands. He half-lowers it, squints. Calls softly into the shadowed courtyard, “Who's there?”

First one pale hand, then another, emerges; then a face, round and wide-eyed, above a uniform dark grey in the moonlight. “Agent Peña,” he says, and Javi places him, suddenly: Colombian, from Bogotá, one of Martínez's people. A kid. If he ever knew his name, he's forgotten it.

The kid comes into the light slowly, keeping his hands up; Javi stares at him blankly for a second, and then shoves the gun back in his waistband, abruptly furious with himself. “What the fuck are you doing,” he hisses.

“There was,” says the kid, and then, “RDF, the Cali,” and, “I was following—someone said–” and then his eyebrows pull together and his mouth half-opens.

“What are _you_ doing here?” he says.

A long, strained heartbeat of time. “Following up on a lead,” says Peña.

The kid's eyes are getting wider and wider. He takes one step back, and then another—and then he's scrambling towards the shadows, his hands out, reaching for—Christ, a gun, a phone, Peña doesn't know which is worse. He moves towards the kid, angling for a tackle, but the kid has a head start, there's no way he can—

There's a short, sharp crack. Unexpectedly, Peña can't see any more.

It takes a few seconds for the ringing in his ears to fade. He swipes a hand across his eyes, blinks his eyelashes clear of the—of what's on them. Looks at his hand, the colorless dark spatters on it, and then at the corpse on the ground.

Herrera's arm is tight around his waist. He says into Peña's ear, “Come back inside.”

“Shit,” says Peña. He shoves himself free. Herrera lets him go; his gun is still in his hand. He looks blank, calm; amused, maybe.

“He came looking,” Peña says, looks away from Herrera to the body, away from the body to his car in Herrera's driveway. “Someone will want to know where he went.”

“So help ID him,” says Herrera amiably. “We'll make his excuses.”

Peña takes a breath in, holds it, feels it expand tight and hot in his lungs. Across from him, Herrera's eyes crinkle at the corners. He takes a step towards Peña, swipes a thumb gently under his eye.

“Relax,” he says. “It looks good on you.”

Peña closes his eyes. After a moment, he feels Herrera's lips on his temple, tender. A mockery of tenderness.

Then he's gone, back towards his house, silent as an owl. Peña can feel his face drying. It cracks when he moves.

He follows.

 

In Herrera's bed, he lies awake. The room is thick with the awful heaviness of the air, sticky and cloying; not even a breeze stirs the curtains.

He'd fucked Herrera hard, from behind. Had told himself he hadn't wanted to see his face. Had dug his fingers into his neck, thought about pushing him down to suck his cock, about shoving him onto the floor. Hadn't done it. He feels as if there's a white-hot needle in his gut. If he moves, all his insides will spill out of him at once.

Next to him, Herrera is breathing steadily, his eyes flickering under their lids in sleep. Javi props himself up on one elbow, watches Herrera's face. When Herrera is awake, he'd never let himself look at it this way: memorizing the details of Herrera's bones, how his eyelashes flutter against his skin.

In the dimness, it seems almost possible to touch him gently.

He imagines reaching out, drawing his finger lightly along Herrera's collarbone. Down Herrera's arm, lightly enough to make the hairs rise, lightly enough for Herrera to shiver just a little in his sleep.

It wouldn't be so hard, after all, to kill him. He would only need a few minutes. Herrera would thrash, would try to push him off, but Javi could hold him down. He did it to Herrera just an hour ago. He can do it again.

He sits up properly, twists to reach behind him, and pulls the pillow into his lap. He'll need to be quick. He can be quick. It's not the most complex plan he's ever run as a federal agent. One knee over Herrera's hips, and the pillow across his mouth, and then nothing in the room but himself, and a corpse.

Nothing in but himself, and the work. And the empty space in his nights where a man had once lived.

He runs his thumb over the corner of the pillow, very gently.

When he lays down again, Herrera's eyes open.

There's no question of Peña having just woken him up. His mouth is pursed; his eyes are gleaming in the faint yellow light from the window. His breathing is still as even and steady as it was when Peña had thought he was asleep.

Peña meets his gaze without blinking. God only knows what Herrera is seeing in his face.

Maybe, if Peña asked nicely, Herrera would tell him what there is to be seen.

Whatever it is, it makes Herrera sigh, close his eyes, and shift his body towards Peña's. After a little while, his breathing is deeper, slower. He's still wearing that near-smile, not-smile.

If Peña lets himself move closer, his forehead will be touching Herrera's shoulder. If he lets himself turn his hips a little, his knee will be against Herrera's thigh. The air is so heavy, so brutally boiling. Like the hot, stinking breath of a great cat on his neck, on the hollow of his back. If he reaches out to touch Herrera—just softly, just gently, Herrera's skin warm against his palm—he'll stick. After only a few minutes, it'll hurt to let go.

 

Messina comes from a meeting with the ambassador with her lips pursed, her sharp face drawn sharper with irritation. Javi looks up at her, raises an eyebrow; she waves him off and slams her office door. Across from him, Steve pauses from flipping through paperwork to stare after her.

“What crawled up her ass and died?” he says.

“Bombing in Cali,” says Javi.

“Oh,” says Steve, and taps his pen against his mouth, looking at Javi through narrowed eyes. “I didn't hear.” A pause, one Javi doesn't like, and then: “You think they're gonna send us to investigate?”

“I think they're already sending us to kill the guy who did it,” says Javi. “Don't know what they need investigated.”

Steve looks at him. Javi bends over his typewriter, abruptly furious with himself.

“Yeah,” says Steve. “Not like there's anything they don't know that they'd like to.”

Days later, he finds himself staring at another corpse, laid out across a bed with her palms open, her arms askew. A hole in her head. Her father sprawled next to her, his blood pooling on the ground. _I talked him down_ , he'd said to Herrera. Christ. He should have been struck by lightning for saying it.

Escobar is alive with fury; los Pepes are worse, rampaging through Bogotá, Medellín, Cali like there's no one and nothing in their path worth worrying about. For them, Javi supposes, there isn't. Bombs go off, one after the other; corpses pile in warehouses, in cocaine labs, faces hacked open, limbs arranged in grotesque displays. Carlos and Fidel Castaño's sense of humor, carved into flesh. Somewhere in the carnage, the corpse of a Colombian police officer turns up. A kid. About Martínez's son's age. Javi never does learn his name.

Don Berna meets him in a little cafe, tells him over coffee he wants him to help find Duque. Tells him the sooner they kill Escobar, the sooner the death will end. Duque is running, taking—his son. His son, the teenager.

He thinks of the weight of the pillow in his hands. Herrera saying: _You're convinced you'll look as clean as the day you came in_.

He calls Messina, and tells her he knows where Fernando Duque is.

Duque is a desperate man; his throat works when he nods to Javi, his hands shake when he makes a deal with him. His son looks every inch of fourteen, long-haired and gawky, calling down to his father from a hotel balcony. His body is open and unprotected, like he thinks he's gonna live forever. Maybe he does.

Then Javi schedules a meeting with Don Berna, and finds Bill Stechner from the CIA sitting at a little table in a bar in his place.

“You're making some very scary people pretty nervous, Javier,” Bill says, cheerfully. “Which puts me in a spot, because I'm the one who suggested they approach you in the first place.”

Javi stares at him. If Bill knows that he's been–

He doubts it. Messina'd said Bill had been in Afghanistan, must have come up in the eighties. If Bill believed he wasn't just a soplón but a maricón as well, he doesn't think they'd be having this conversation politely, in a comfortable little restaurant in Javi's neighborhood, while Bill drinks beer. He seems like the type to prefer a narcotraficante over a cocksucker.

“I have our nation's long-term interests in mind,” says Bill. Peña stares at his beady little eyes, the way his beard moves when his jaw works. Narcos, after all, are driven by greed alone. An understandable vice, especially to the CIA. A useful one.

Bill tilts his bottle at him, smiles as if he can hear what Javi's thinking. “And, sitting here tonight, that means making sure the right folks are left standing when Escobar gets his bullet.”

Javi thought it when he first went there, and he thinks it again: Duque's hotel is dingy, dark and ugly, the kind of place he never expected a narco lawyer to hole up. Looking at it makes his stomach twist; seeing Duque's wife's car makes it twist further. He'd told him to hide it where los Castaños couldn't find it. He'd said so. Hadn't he said so?

He opens the trunk, already knowing what he'll find there.

He'd never thought, before this long stretch of nightmare, about having dead bodies on his conscience. Sources are to be protected, he understands that well enough; the people he loses are to be grieved, avenged, immortalized however he can. But having corpses to carry—feeling their ghosts on his shoulders, heavier than a bulletproof vest—seeing their faces, their bodies, when he closes his eyes—this is new.

Is there such a thing as justice? If there is, then surely Peña should be its agent. If there is, surely Peña should have been in jail himself long ago.

He finds a whore in his neighborhood, a dark-eyed little thing with rosebud lips and tits that just fill up the palm of his hand, soft like ripe fruit. He squeezes them while he's fucking her, reaches around to grope at them while she bounces on his cock; her hair is a ripple of darkness right down to her ass, smelling sweet and warm and flowery, and he kisses the freckles scattered along her shoulders and wishes he wasn't wishing she was someone else.

Herrera himself is out of the country for now, gone for some business Javi can't bring himself to ask about. It might be for the best that he isn't in Colombia, though. Martínez sits them down and tells them, firmly, about who he wants to be standing over Escobar's body. Javi watches Steve smoke, his pale hands and tired eyes, thinks about CIA Bill's ugly, clever face.

They find Blackie. They talk to him in a small interrogation room, Javi shifting in and out of the light, Steve a hovering silhouette at his back. Valeria Velez dies in her own news van, her pale dress torn, her beautiful face smeared with blood. They chase La Quica down the streets of Medellín, Javi saying nonsense into his phone, talking and talking in the desperate hope Quica will stay on the line long enough for Martínez's son and his truck full of radios to track him down. Praying that the voice whose name he's calling, staticky and uncertain, will stay alive long enough for Javi to find him.

He can feel Pablo Escobar's death, closing in around him like enormous wings. He'd thought it would make him feel—not _happy_ , but. As if something was over. He guesses he should have known better.

He never seems to.

A month passes, during which Escobar stays, for once, quiet. Los Pepes announces it's disbanding; it's won the war. The press jumps on the story. Javi declines to comment, declines to comment, watches Messina sweep through the office with her jaw clenched and the bags darker and darker under her eyes. Herrera finds him, less than a block from the bar where he used to hand over lists of people to murder, and sucks him off in the backseat of his own car on a deserted road overlooking the city. Neither of them mentions los Castaños, or the war, or Bill. Or that he hasn't spoken to Don Berna since Duque died. Instead, they rock against each other, breath hot on each other's skin, nails digging in, not quite hard enough to draw blood.

And then Don Berna does call him, and tells him someone tried to blow up Judy Moncada.

Judy's mansion looks smaller than he remembered it; so does the burnt-out wreck of Judy's car, a grey-red skeleton incongruous on her rolling green lawn. Judy looks small, herself, hands waving, cigarette between her fingers dancing wildly. Javi feels exhausted watching her.

“Last I heard,” she says, “leaking classified intelligence is a federal offense.”

He says, wearily, “Are you threatening me?”

“Yes, I'm threatening you,” she snaps. Javi flicks his eyes up to Don Berna, who looks like he would rather be anywhere else. “You know perfectly well where Montecasino is,” Judy continues, “and los Castaños, and where Pacho Herrera is.” She stares at him. Javi stares back for a beat, until he understands, and then carefully puts his hand on his eyes and presses until stars burst.

“Okay,” he says. “And you understand that Pacho Herrera knows where _you_ are.”

Judy quails briefly at that, but shakes it off. She gestures furiously with the cigarette. “I'm just asking for protection, Agent Peña. That's your job.”

“My _job_ ,” says Javi, and shakes his head. “My job is to catch narcos, Judy. The DEA isn't a charity organization. No one gets something for nothing.”

She looks at him. “And you think I don't have any information the Americans want?”

Next to him, Berna's breath hitches.

Javi looks at her. He feels—heavy, heavier than he has in a month. Thinks about Herrera's voice, Herrera's smile. The month he's spent without blood on his hands. Herrera saying: _Your problem is that you think you're a tourist._

“I'm not going to sell you out to Herrera or the Cali cartel,” he says. “I'll keep my mouth shut. If you can come to the front door of Holguín with Gilberto Rodriguez's head on a stick, I'm not going to kick you out. But you don't have any information that I want, Judy.” He gets up, turns away. “You don't have anything I want to do with.”

“Maybe I will bring you Gilberto Rodriguez's head on a stick,” she shouts after him. “Maybe I will.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Go for it. I'll tell my boss to keep an eye out for you. Hey, how about this, you find a guy named Bill Stechner.” He opens her front door. “Ask him to set up a meeting.”

Don Berna catches up with him outside, halfway to his car, and puts a heavy hand on his shoulder. “You shouldn't do that,” he says.

“I'm getting a little tired of people telling me what I should and shouldn't do,” Javi says, harsh. He feels exhausted, worse than Messina, worse than Steve. Had started to think of life after Escobar, life in Colombia without Medellín's ghosts hovering over his head. About what it might be like to be free of some of these bodies.

“You shouldn't be sending people after Cali,” says Don Berna. “Giving them names.”

“You're Cali's bodyguards now?” says Javi. “Keeping an eye out for them?”

“I'm not in bed with Cali,” says Berna. Javi stops dead on the drive, feels his hand curl into a fist.

He deliberately relaxes it, one finger at a time. “Great,” he says. “Good for you. Then neither of us has to get involved in Judy's turf wars. Everyone goes home happy.”

“I'm telling you to be careful what you say, Agent Peña,” says Berna. “Especially when you don't know who's listening.”

Javi turns and looks at him. Berna's mouth is flat under his mustache; he's watching Javi with narrowed eyes. Javi stares back.

“Who's listening?” he says.

Don Berna looks, for a whole heartbeat, as if he's going to say something. Then he shakes his head, and lets go of Javi's shoulder.

“Go back to Holguín,” he says. “Just don't say I didn't warn you.”

Javi will think, later, that he should have known then what was going to happen.

He gets back to the office late. It's nearly deserted, a janitor hovering on the other side of the desks wiping down a glass door, a ceiling fan chopping the hot, stuffy air into pieces above him. He tugs at his collar, circles around his own chair, and swings into Messina's room.

Bill Stechner is there, his legs propped up on her desk, reading a magazine.

Javi stops dead. “Where's Messina?” he says.

“Reassigned,” says Bill, turns a page. “Something you wanted to tell her?”

Javi takes a breath, looks at him, and, for once in his goddamn life, thinks for a second. “Judy Moncada,” he says.

“You didn't hear?” Bill says. “Judy's gone to America. She has an interview with the Miami Herald in, oh, about five hours.” He puts down the magazine. “Now, I can't be certain, but I bet she has a story to tell about the involvement of a certain DEA agent with los Pepes.”

Javi feels, very suddenly, very cold.

Bill looks at him directly. For the first time Javi can remember, he doesn't look remotely amused. “You should've stayed in your lane,” he says.

“And Cali, too, right?” Javi says. It sounds to his own ears as if his voice is coming from a great distance. “They get a pass? How much do they pay you for your protection?”

“Pay me?” Bill laughs at him, openly. “For everything you know, Agent Peña,” he says, and Javi hears Herrera's voice layered over his, feels his whole body twitch with the effort of suppressing violence, “you're extremely naive.”

Javi looks at him. He's never felt older in his life.

“I think the ambassador wants to see you,” says Bill. He's grinning as he gets up, brushes past Javi on his way out Messina's door. Javi hates the way he speaks English, hates the wide vowels, the little hitches and breaths, the way he pauses on words like he's chewing on them before he lets them dribble out. Hates Bill's beard, his grey hair like a hippie gone wrong; hates his bright little blue eyes, his hands, his idiotic little vest. Hates the way Bill breathes, and the way his heart beats, and can do nothing about it. “I guess word about this Miami Herald thing is spreading like a prairie fire. I think you're going home, but, uh. You didn't hear that from me.”

Javi's felt worse before. He knows he has. He can even think of the night when.

Knowing that doesn't improve anything.

 

“So you gave up on cocktails,” says Peña.

“I know a lost cause when I see one,” says Herrera, and smiles down at the glass of whiskey he's pouring at the bar. Peña doesn't recognize the brand, or the smile; it's a little quieter than the way Herrera usually looks at him, a little sharper, as if he's enjoying a private joke. “I think you'll enjoy this.”

Peña watches him as he mixes his own drink, something tall and alarmingly purple. In the evening dimness, the lights reflecting from the pool are faint, yellow. Under them, Herrera's eyes are glinting coins.

“You seem to be thinking about something,” he says.

“Yeah, well,” says Peña, swirls the whiskey in his glass, “Judy Moncada came to me for help.”

Herrera raises his eyebrows and settles into the chair next to him. “Deja vu.”

“Sure,” Peña says. “Something like that.” He glances at Herrera. “If it turns out you were behind her again, your endgame is above my pay grade.”

That makes Herrera smile. “I certainly hope it is,” he says, and then, before Peña can respond to that, “but no. Señora Moncada prefers to act as an independent agent. That shouldn't be surprising.”

“Yeah, it wasn't,” says Peña. It really is very good whiskey; he's more of a functional drinker than an aesthetic one, but even he can taste how smooth it is, how softly the smoke blurs into the alcohol burn. This is better than anything he's ever had at even the fanciest DEA event.

He chooses deliberately not to examine that, and sets the glass down on the table. Swallows. “I don't have any names for you tonight.”

“Aside from Judy's,” says Herrera, “who I think we both know I knew to be wary of already, and who I think we both know is no longer a problem for me.” He shrugs expressively, and doesn't react to Peña, who can feel a muscle in his jaw jump. “I'm sure I can make do with the pleasure of your company.”

“I'm going back to the United States,” says Peña. Herrera's eyebrows shoot up, and he takes a moment, amidst the miasma of misery, to feel the small, petty satisfaction of having _surprised_ the asshole for once. To know there's something that the Central fucking Intelligence Agency kept from both of them. “Steve's driving me to the airport tomorrow. A professional conduct review.”

“I see,” says Herrera. A beat. “A professional conduct review.”

“You aren't asking me shit about that,” says Peña sharply.

“I would never pry into your personal affairs,” says Herrera, and sips his drink. He's smiling a little. Peña feels that muscle in his jaw twitch again.

“I don't know when I'm going to be back,” he says. “Or if I'll be back.” And then, hating himself, hating the house he's in and the job he's in and the DEA, knowing he shouldn't say it, “The next time you see me—if you see me again—Escobar is probably going to be dead.”

Herrera's whole body goes still.

Then he moves, faster than Peña's ever seen him move before, up out of his chair and into Peña's lap, sliding his hand into Peña's hair and kissing him like he'll die if he doesn't. Peña gasps into it, too startled to do anything but let Herrera lick into his mouth, his nails digging into Peña's scalp. His other hand is moving down, cupping his ass and pulling him in; Peña couldn't stop him even if he wanted to, and, God help him, he doesn't want to.

He grinds forward. Herrera's hard already, Jesus. Peña rocks up against him for a brief, achingly good second before Herrera pulls back to kiss down his neck, bite at his collarbone—Peña has to push him away before he leaves a mark. When he dares to look at Herrera's face, it looks—lit up from the inside, his eyes glittering and hungry.

“Agent Peña,” he says, “spread your legs for me, please.”

“Oh, fuck _me_ ,” says Peña.

On his knees, Herrera looks like porn. Worse, like a professional. He kisses at Peña's head, sits back on his heels, and licks his lips, slowly, deliberately.

“If this is the last time I'll get to do this until you come back from the United States,” he says, “I had better make you enjoy it.”

Peña's cock jumps. Herrera smiles—that same sharp, private smile—and leans forward, and swallows him down.

He's so beautiful. Peña tries not to think about that, when he's in Herrera's bed, when Herrera's in his; nevertheless, it's true. Herrera's lips, his cheekbones. How soft his hair is, when Peña slides his hands into it. The way he looks when he's focused on something, white-hot, a torch melting through steel.

He's focused now. Peña feels more and more—though he knows, _knows_ how deep in self-delusion he must be to even think it—that the Herrera who Steve met is not the Herrera with his lips wrapped around Peña's cock; that the man who kidnapped Steve, thoughtful and cruel and smug, is not the man looking up at Peña from under his eyelashes. Oh, he's still thoughtful, yes—cruel, yes—smug, always, always; but there's an intensity there that Peña has only begun to see in the last months. Is almost afraid of seeing, whenever he looks at Herrera's face.

It's there now, stronger than he's ever seen it before. His mouth, bobbing; the soft wet heat of him, the _goodness_ of it. When he's about to come, he tugs at Herrera's hair—something Herrera's never minded him doing, has often even liked, and indeed Herrera is smiling when he pulls off, and Peña comes hard onto his face.

Herrera draws a knuckle over his cheek and licks his finger, thoughtfully. Then he stands up. Peña blinks at him, his body hazy with pleasure, as Herrera steps between his legs.

“Are you proud of yourself?” he says. He strokes, very gently, down Peña's cheek. “What you've done?”

“Proud?” says Peña. He can't quite think.

“I think you should be rewarded, Agent Peña,” says Herrera. He looks—amused. “You've worked so hard.” He leans in. “You're risking so much.”

It's that thought that pierces the fog. Peña shakes his head, leans back.

“I can't give you more names,” he says. “Not again.”

Herrera raises his eyebrows. “Never?”

“Never,” says Peña. It sounds false to his own ears. He adds, not moving, “I can leave now.”

Herrera looks at him. The intensity in his eyes hasn't faded; the amusement, though, seems to be draining like water through a sieve, leaving his face hard and serious. Peña breathes through the silence, watches Herrera think.

“No,” he says, eventually. “No, I'm not going to make you leave.”

“Okay,” says Peña. “Okay.”

Herrera cups his face, draws him in. He tastes like alcohol and smoke. Peña thinks, helplessly, that Herrera will never not know what he tastes like. If he ends up gone forever—if he ends up losing his job—if he ends up in jail in the States, jail here in Colombia—Herrera will still know how Peña went soft when he kissed him. Will still know how he whispered _please_ into Herrera's mouth. Will still know how he touched Herrera's body, desperately. Will still know how he couldn't stop wanting it.

He lets his eyes slide shut, imagines himself on a plane, a plane to America, to anywhere better. Rising through the air and clouds, breaking out of the atmosphere. Reaching the sun, the stars, the flat blackness behind them. Leaving the whole sky behind.

 

It's the wind that wakes him. The sun is running like butter over the bedsheets; somewhere in his apartment, someone is burning bread; and there's a breeze through the window. The curtains flutter up into empty space.

He lies there for a few minutes, pleasantly conscious of inhabiting his own body: the ache in his legs, how his muscles pull against his bones. Outside, tires squeal. Someone honks a horn, then honks it again, longer. In Javi's kitchen, a plate clatters.

Carrillo's put on his shirt and socks, which Javi hasn't bothered with. He holds a plate of toast out to Javi without looking at him; Javi takes the toast, leaving Carrillo holding the plate, and carries it in his mouth while he fiddles with his coffee filters. When the machine clicks and the water begins to bubble, he sits down on his couch and bites, spraying crumbs.

“You're like a child,” says Carrillo, fond and irritated, and drops the empty plate onto his lap. Javi swallows ostentatiously and grins at him, watches the exasperated warmth in his black shark's eyes flicker briefly into exasperated want.

“Come down here,” he says.

Carrillo raises his eyebrows. “I should encourage you?”

“Hmm,” says Javi, and reaches up to pull Carrillo's face to his. Carrillo goes easily, after all, and Javi tilts his head and lets their mouths touch just softly, just softly again, until Carrillo makes an amused noise and braces himself with a hand on Javi's shoulder and visibly applies himself to the task of kissing him properly.

Javi loves this, maybe even loves it more than the sex: nothing urgent, nothing desperate, just a lazy and unhurried stretch of silence, their lips sliding together, the bright scrape of their morning stubble, the warmth of Carrillo's skin against his fingers. Kissing Carrillo in his kitchen, knowing it's not going to turn into anything more; letting arousal flare easily in his ribcage, and subside, waiting patiently for its moment. It'll come. He has time.

Carrillo pulls away, straightens. Javi grins up at him, unrepentant. “Absolutely, you should encourage me.”

“You'll never learn,” says Carrillo, long-suffering, and turns away to the sink. Javi stands up to follow him. The water's spraying into the sink; he slides the plate under it, bumps his shoulder against Carrillo's, lifts the dish soap from its place above the faucet.

The car horn honks again, louder this time. He checks his watch, scratches at the back of his neck. Even the light seems different here: fainter, bluer. He pulls at his collar. He feels like he's underwater. Drowning, maybe.

He'd expected to feel something when he'd landed at the airport, when he'd passed through customs. A change in the air. But it had been the same air, tasteless and stale; the linoleum had stretched before him and behind him, as if it didn't care what land it lived on.

There's so many things he forgets about his homeland, every time he returns. For one, the sheer fucking profusion of flags—how they hang from every spare surface, flutter out of every window and fly in every courtyard. The peculiar smell of every building, sanitized and dusty, warm and metallic, like the smell of other people's houses. The shape of English words on billboards and street signs, the missed-step-in-the-dark of being greeted with _Hello_ by strangers. Rewriting, all at once, his definition of the comprehensible.

A woman says his name, skinny and blond, her face washed out in the dimness. He stands and follows her down a long hallway, where she leads him to a large wooden door, pale and unmarked. His suit jacket feels hot and heavy on his shoulders, his balance uncertain without the weight of a gun. Overdressed and naked at the same time.

He pushes the door open. The day has gone almost cool, the breeze light. The sun is beginning to wobble over the shops. Behind him, Carrillo's stride is long and loping. Javi feels suddenly hyper-aware of him, of the heat of his body, the distance between Carrillo's arm and his own. How Carrillo had looked the night before, the sounds he'd made; about Carrillo leaning into him just an hour ago, his rough skin, his soft mouth.

“Sir,” he says to the men sitting in front of him, “do I need a lawyer?”

“Your new friend will be living upstairs the next time I sleep at your place,” says Carrillo.

“Stop calling him my friend, I haven't met him,” says Javi. He knows he's being baited; the attention is warm and golden in his chest.

“We're not the review board,” says the man at the center desk, and gives him a flat half-smile. “We're from Operations.”

“He'll be making you think of the comforts of home,” says Carrillo. He lifts cupped hands to his face and comes away with his cigarette lit, handing the lighter and a cigarette to Javi when he holds out his hand. “Soon you'll only speak English around me. All you'll eat is apple pie and hamburgers.”

Javi coughs laughing around his cigarette. “You must be so jealous,” he says. He presses the lighter back into Carrillo's warm, dry palm. When he catches Carrillo's eye, he can see the same thought in his mind reflected there: Carrillo's fingers the night before, curling in Javi's mouth, Javi's tongue around them, his legs spreading, his hips lifting up. He says to the man from Operations, “What do you want from me?”

“Jealous?” says Carrillo, and laughs. “Oh, definitely. What could I possibly want to do with my time besides be jealous of you?”

“In 1992,” says the man from Operations, “do you know how much cocaine we estimated came into the U.S. from Colombia?” He pauses. “Three hundred and eleven metric tons.”

Javi slows his step and lets his arm brush against Carrillo's. Carrillo isn't looking at him; he's smiling, one of his rare and keen smiles, at a storefront across the street. No, not the storefront; the street itself, the children kicking a football to each other on the sidewalk, the dogs trotting after them with their ears flopping and their tongues lolling out of their mouths. The wind; the warmth. The sweet, deliberate cadence of a summer morning.

“And in 1993,” says the man, “during the hunt for Escobar, three hundred and seventy-two metric tons.” His face is shadowed. Javi can only make out the edges of his face in the narrow, filtered light from the window behind him. The darkness around his temples, in the hollows of his eyes.

“Nothing,” he says to Carrillo. “You don't want anything else at all.”

The tables outside their restaurant are full. They find one inside instead, shunted together beside a dingy window reluctantly filtering sun. Soon, being indoors like this will be unbearable; for now, it's only a little warm, a little crowded, a tickle in the throat not yet fanning itself into fever. Across from Javi, Carrillo is scanning the crowd. His body is loose and easy in his chair, the way it so rarely is, the way it will so rarely be over the next years. Under the table, his knees are bumping Javi's, solid and real. Javi's heart is hammering in his chest. More than a decade into the future, a voice is saying to him, “Agent Peña, how much do you know about the Cali cartel?”

Later, he leaves the room. Later, he leaves the country. For now, Carrillo's eyes are on his, his thumb brushing against Javi's palm, and someone is calling his name. There's a call for him, here at this bar. News from Medellín.

 

He expects the city lights to linger for hours after he reaches the countryside. They would if he were in Bogotá, maybe, or Monterrey, where the city glitters like a diamond below no matter how high you are in the mountains. In Mexico City, the light is heavier than the smog, thicker than the humidity; the night is orange for miles away, a gravity well, blanketing stars.

Here, the darkness swallows him before he realizes it's coming. The road is a fifty-foot pool of headlights, shapes and shadows in shifting grey, afterimages on a dead television. Yellow skidding under his tires. The occasional flat camera flash of an exit sign.

Beyond his window, he can hear night birds calling. He fumbles with the radio, English to salsa to Jesus Christ, and finally to rock, dirty and half-static. Some Chilean he heard in a bar ages ago, when he and Steve had been fighting over an informant, or a dirty cop, or who would buy the beer.

The road rises. He leans into the gas pedal, lets himself crest the hill faster than he meant to. Turns up the volume on the radio.

His hands, when he looks at them clenched around the steering wheel, are white-knuckled.

He feels drunk, almost. Impossibly light, nauseated, as if his bones are humming, as if he's grown too big for his skin. This is the turn that, if he takes it, will lead him down towards the border. This is the yellow glare of the road sign. Javi turns up the radio again, crests another hill, keeps driving. Watches the dotted lines shift and swerve ahead of him. He can get all the way to Cali on this road. Could get to Canada, too, if he turned around now. Could drive the whole road to Calgary, if he just reversed the car. Three thousand kilometers north, fifty feet of light at a time.

 

### THREE 

Less than a week after he gets back from the United States, while he's flipping through files, the phone rings. Javi pops his pen in his mouth, keeping the papers splayed open with one hand and cradling the receiver with the other, and mumbles, “This is Peña.”

“I know,” says Herrera. “You should come have dinner with me tonight.”

The pen, when it falls out of his mouth, leaves a dark streak on his slacks. “You,” he says, and then puts the phone firmly down on his desk and goes down on hands and knees for the pen.

“You can't call me,” he says, when he's sufficiently recovered to come back up. “Don't ever call me here again.”

“Why not?” says Herrera. “You have your own office now.”

Peña feels his hand twitch. Through his open door, he can see Feistl, Trujillo, Van Ness, DEA agents and CNP, in the hallways and at their desks—all of them vetted, none of them trustworthy.

“You want to tell me who told you that?” he says.

He hears Herrera laugh, half-static. “What I want,” he says, and then pauses, long enough for Peña to feel his ears go hot, “is dinner. Come over to my house. Drink my wine.”

Peña clenches his jaw and deliberately pinches the skin between his thumb and forefinger, hard. “I can't,” he says. “I'm working.” It's even true.

“That's a shame,” says Herrera. “In that case, why don't you close your blinds and lock your office door.”

Peña doesn't know what his face does. Across the rows of desks, Agent Feistl catches his eyes, raises his eyebrows and mouths something concerned. Peña shakes his head and makes a cutting motion across his throat. Christ.

“I _can't,_ ” he hisses into the phone.

“Why,” says Herrera, “can't you walk?”

Peña presses his fingers into his eyelids and watches the stars burst. He can, in his pants, feel his dick—not totally hard, but stirring—and he pushes the palm of his hand against it under the desk forcefully, willing it to go down.

Through the phone, Herrera is laughing again. He must have made some kind of noise. “You can hang up the phone,” he says. “Do whatever you need, Agent Peña.”

Peña's dick does not go down.

“Fuck me,” he says bitterly in English, sets the phone on the desk, and gets up.

When the door is closed and locked and the blinds are shut, he settles into his chair and picks up the phone, balancing it between his shoulder and his ear. “Jesus,” he says. “What are you going to do now, ask me what I'm wearing?”

“I wish you would come over,” says Herrera mildly. “I think you would enjoy it. How often does someone cook dinner for you? If you have the opportunity for luxury, isn't it wrong to waste it?”

“How often do I get wined and dined with narco money?” says Peña, chokes out a laugh. His pants are open; he's palming himself through his boxers, just gently. “Not often.”

“You don't like being wined and dined?” says Herrera.

“No,” says Peña. He means to say it firmly.

“Hmm,” says Herrera, noncommittal. Peña grits his teeth, rocks into his hand, lets the silence stretch until he can't take it any more and finally bursts out, “Are you–”

“Of course I am,” says Herrera. Peña hears a spring creak on his end—a bed, a chair—and then a low, pleased noise. “You aren't?”

“I am,” says Peña, though he knows that Herrera doesn't need to ask, that his breathing is short and his voice hoarse. “Herrera, I–”

“Is it because you don't like to owe anyone anything?” says Herrera. “A nice dinner, a few drinks, you feel obligated, is that it? They've,” a near-silent laugh, another low creak, “paid your price?”

“I don't owe you crap,” says Peña raggedly.

“No,” says Herrera, “you don't. After all, you gave me Medellín.”

Peña says, with great feeling, _“Fuck.”_

“No,” says Herrera, “no, I think what you don't like, Agent Peña, is being charmed. I think you don't like it when someone is kind to you.” _T_ _e gusta_ , Peña hears, _it pleases you_ , and pushes up into his hand, unable to stop himself. “I think you don't like it,” says Herrera, pauses, sighs with pleasure, “I think you don't like it, knowing that if you wanted, things could be easy. You could be easy. That if you wanted, you could have—nothing but good food, and—soft beds, and—knowing how badly you're wanted, all the time—how much I–”

He breaks off, hisses softly. “Ah.”

“Did you,” says Peña.

A brief pause. Herrera says, “Keep touching yourself for me. Since you won't let me touch you tonight.”

“Fuck,” says Peña again, scrabbles for a tissue, like he's a teenager again, desperate, unprepared—pumps once, twice, and comes, gasping into the phone.

“You did, didn't you,” he says, once he can breathe again and his heartbeat is starting to slow. “Get off.” It feels strangely, obliquely important. Maybe because Herrera won't admit to it; maybe because of the startling, unreadable fact of what did it for Herrera. _How much I–_

“I'll be seeing you soon,” says Herrera. “Unless you want me to call your office again.”

The phone goes dead. Peña blinks at it, slowly.

He feels as if he's won something. He's not entirely sure what.

 

But after that, weeks pass.

It's normal for Herrera to go weeks without calling him. More than normal, it's unremarkable—Javi shouldn't be remarking on it. Doesn't know why he is.

Nevertheless, when he's tapped on the shoulder at a bar, he feels some of the tension in his shoulders unwind once he sees who it is. The kid is shockingly beautiful, long-limbed and dark-eyed; if he were Herrera, he'd be fucking him, too.

“Hi,” the kid says, and smiles at him with astonishingly white teeth. “He sent me to buy you a drink.”

“What,” says Javi, “he's too lazy to buy me one himself?”

The kid—Marcel? Miguel? Manuel—settles on the stool next to him, gesturing, and Javi watches as the bartender reaches up for the whiskey on the highest shelf. “He isn't in Colombia,” the kid says. “You don't know that already?”

“I always like to have my intel confirmed by my informants,” Javi says, to shake him. The kid just looks amused, though. No wonder Herrera likes him. Cada oveja con su pareja.

The whiskey comes; he drinks it. “So,” he says. “You came all the way from Cali to tell me he's out of the country?”

“There's always business to do in Bogotá,” says the kid, smiles at him. “But he sent me here to ask if there's anything you want to tell _him_.”

“To—tell him?” says Javi blankly. A hundred things flash through his mind: Feistl and Van Ness in Cali, the money trail of Franklin Jurado, Bill Stechner, the ambassador, George Bush. “What the fuck would I want to _tell_ him?”

“I'm just passing on the message,” says the kid, and sips at his own drink. He's not a kid, not really; there's a sharp intelligence in his delicate face, some edge of cruelty behind that disarming prettiness. Javi reminds himself forcibly that this man has certainly killed for Herrera, has most likely killed with him.

He looks at the kid again, carefully. Then he says, “Okay. Last chance. Why are you here?”

The kid smiles with his mouth, not his eyes. He says, “Pacho says to tell you that if you change your mind about wanting to tell him anything–”

“No,” says Javi, hard.

“–if you change your mind,” the kid continues implacably, “if you run into any more trouble from the Americans, he's always happy to do you a favor.”

Javi stares at the wall, then at his drink. It's a crowded bar, the good kind of crowded, where no one can hear anyone over the sound of everyone else. But crowded doesn't mean safe—nothing means safe; nothing ever has.

“You tell Pacho,” he says, “that I am the trouble.”

The kid just smiles at him.

“That's what I tried to tell him,” he says, and slips off the barstool. “It was nice seeing you, Javier Peña.”

Javi stares after his curly head as it disappears into the crowd.

He walks home. The bar is close to his place, the weather almost nice for once. Almost, not quite; the pipes drip condensation, the puddles in the gutters gleam like oil slicks. Years later; a new cartel, a new city, and the same thick, wet heat. The same old longing for the absent rain.

A few blocks from home, a dog starts following him, one of the triangle-eared mutts that sniff around cafes and butcher shops. Javi finds a stick on the ground, waves it around a little and tosses it behind him, and watches the dog lope away into the darkness. Its tail is wagging, like he's done it a kindness. Like it thinks he actually wants to play.

Who sends a man from Cali to Bogotá to check up on the DEA agent they're fucking? To ask how he's _doing?_ Herrera doesn't seriously think he's going to get any usable intel out of Javi. What is his endgame, the one he hopes is above Javi's pay grade? What the hell can he possibly want?

Above him, the sky is the grey-yellow of a fading bruise. Javi sits on his front step, lights a cigarette, feels the whiskey soak into his stomach and his blood. Feels the wind flicker around him and subside.

When the embers are close enough to his skin that he can feel the heat, long before it starts to hurt, he drops the cigarette on the ground.

 

He goes to the jungle. He leaves again.

He hates the jungle. Always has; it makes him feel like a rat, a squirrel, something small and trapped, twice as far from the sky as he wants to be. Even in clearings, even by lakes and rivers, he's acutely aware of the presence of life: every direction he looks, something breathing, watching, eating its way under his feet. Older than he is, and smarter, just waiting patiently for him to cross the invisible boundary into its territory.

Even back home and out for a run, the only obstacles on his horizon the broad brown hills, he still feels—twitchy. Unsettled. Like he's skipped a beat, and the song is going on without him. Like there's something he's missed.

He's never had the trick some others have—Steve, Trujillo, Martínez—of losing himself in his body when he runs, of letting the burn in his legs and his lungs rise up and take him over for a little while. Instead, counterintuitively, he feels a hundred times more inside his world: aware of every birdcall, every passerby, every place on his body where his sweat sticks his shirt to his chest.

Bill Stechner's face swims up in his mind, unwanted, grinning.

Javi grits his teeth, speeds up, and tries to focus on the rhythm of his breath for a while. The open sky, great storm clouds massing in the west just in front of the sun, like a crowd jostling at the city walls. The pounding heat, dense and shimmering on every side of him, like a mask over his nose and inside his mouth.

It's been months since he felt like a shower made him clean. Still, he stands under the spray, breathing in the hot chemical smell of his shampoo, until the shower-head hiccups and spits ice-cold water down his back. He towels himself off. He looks at the spikes and slicks of his hair in the mirror. He pulls on his jeans and his shirt. He searches for his gun, and finds it. He thinks, abstractly and then with great specificity, about killing Bill Stechner. He puts his gun on the coffee table. He does up his boots. He goes out to buy a burger and a beer.

When he gets home, it's growing dark. It's still in his head, caught under his mind's fingernails: the image of Bill on the ground, a hole in his head—shoved out the door of his helicopter—on American television, wearing handcuffs, looking for once in his goddamn life, off-balance—

Christ, this is what it must be like to be a narco _all the time._

Somewhere in America right now, Steve is probably putting his daughter to bed. Javi sighs, runs his fingers through his hair until it stands on end again.

Of all his colleagues and coworkers Herrera might kill, Bill is certainly at the very bottom of the list. Though if Herrera were the kind of cartel leader who declared war on cops at all, Javi would be dead already. Had half-expected to die, that first time he'd climbed into Herrera's car.

He doesn't quite expect that any more.

It's not just Escobar's death, though God knows Javi still sees Escobar in his dreams at night, wakes up gasping, looking at Steve's corpse, Messina's corpse, Martínez's corpse, fumbling for his gun. There's something new in his body now, coiled and hot. He feels alert, almost; awake, in a way he hasn't been since—in years. When he opens his eyes in the morning, he feels the edge of something almost like anger, wound tight in his chest. He feels almost angry right now.

He shoves his jeans and shirt off in his bedroom and stretches out on top of his crumpled sheets, the heat sprawled like a great dog on his shoulders. Long before he can hear the first raindrops, he's asleep.

 

“Nobody lives here, boss,” says one of the policemen.

“That's bullshit,” says Javi, looking theatrically around the abandoned house. Next to him, Captain Calderon isn't openly laughing, but it's a close thing. “Intel had Pacho here last night.”

They turn the house upside down, for the look of the thing. Javi throws open closet doors, peers out windows, and thinks about Herrera. Maybe in Oaxaca, maybe in the Yucatán; maybe in Sonora. It's been years since Javi was in the desert. He tugs open a cupboard under a heavy marble sink, looks into the stacked mouthwash and cleaning supplies, and sees the distant horizon there, the colorless earth and the curled yellow grasses clinging desperately to the hills. The way the finger-thin branches of the trees crack and crook around themselves, grey-barked, leaning into the wind.

Maybe Herrera's in Monterrey. Just a day's drive from home.

They leave the empty house. In a convoy of police cars, the whirr of the air conditioning on his face, he looks sidelong at Calderon. The man's face is still, solemn. He's a good liar—not good enough, but good. There are so many men in his position, scattered through Colombia, through America; Javi remembers speaking only English in a little green room, before there was ever a Search Bloc, years and years ago. Steve at his side, men like Calderon surrounding him.

It would have been so easy for Javi to be him.

He's been circling around the thought for weeks; he wishes finally thinking it made him feel better. The way Herrera had talked to him on the phone–

It could have gone beyond giving him names of sicarios and safehouses; it could have gone beyond seeing Pablo Escobar's men hanging in the center of Medellín. It could still go beyond that, if he let it. If he turned the car around now.

He's known good men. Martínez is one; his father is another. Steve, for all his anger and occasional stupidity, his messiness and violence, was a good man. Javi has, his whole life, loved good men. He's just never been stupid enough to think he was one.

He doesn't think he's a good man now. Hadn't he just thought, the other night, about Bill Stechner's bleeding body? Hadn't he thought of the bodies of the people he's responsible for? Escobar's men, thousands of paisas, Colombian police. Isn't he still responsible for their deaths?

Isn't he still responsible?

“You know what's happening here?” he asks Calderon.

Calderon looks at him.

“I'm giving you one chance to do the right thing,” he says. _One chance_ , when the United States and God and even Steve gave him twenty, gave him thirty; one chance to do the right thing, when he's been running through chances like casino chips, hundreds of thousands in the hole and still begging the house to deal him in.

But God, he's been worse things than a hypocrite.

He goes into the house. Gilberto Rodriguez's house.

When Steve had called him at the bar in Washington to tell him it was over, that Escobar was dead at last, he'd tried to close his eyes and see it. The rooftop, the chase. He'd touched the photograph, later, left a fingerprint-smear on its gloss. His mark on the mission to bring down Pablo Escobar.

He'd wondered how it would have felt, if he was there. If he would have called Herrera after, and told him to come over. If he would have been the one to tell Herrera it had happened.

But instead, Steve's voice in his ear, all he'd been able to remember was the first time he had called in los Castaños and Don Berna in the heights of Medellín. Chasing Velasco across a roof, Trujillo at his back, two fascists and a narco and their pet army below him. Feeling like at any moment, he could take a wrong step, crash through the rickety metal, and keep falling. Like, if he jumped, he'd never hit the ground.

There's a pool in Gilberto Rodriguez's house. He stares at it. Thinks about the light, playing across Herrera's eyes. Of all the stupid, irrelevant things, the way Herrera smiles.

He lifts up the stairs, and looks at Rodriguez's face.

 

He gets home late, and knows there's someone in the house before he opens the door.

He thinks about taking the gun out of his waistband. Instead, he unlocks the door and eases it open a few inches.

Nothing immediately tries to kill him. He lets it swing fully open, toes off his shoes in the entryway, and hangs his bag on the coatrack. When he closes the door behind him, he doesn't bother to turn the lock.

It's not a big apartment; he only has to take a few steps before he sees Herrera there, leaning against his kitchen table, his hands tucked into his pockets. He looks up at the sound of Javi's footsteps.

“Agent Peña,” he says, dangerously quiet.

Peña drops his keys on the counter.

“So,” he says. “The Cali cartel knows where I live.”

Herrera doesn't answer, just peels his body away from the table, takes one looming step towards Peña. Peña tilts his chin up, looks Herrera in the eye. He doesn't know whether he's being defiant or baring his neck.

Maybe there's not so much a difference as he thought.

Herrera says, nearly a growl, “Come here. Bend over the table.”

What else can Peña do? He goes.

Herrera already has a bottle of lube in his hand—he must have gotten it from the bedroom. He might have been here for hours already, might have been waiting here since he heard about Gilberto. Might have planted something in Peña's apartment—a bug, a bomb. He eases one finger inside Peña—Christ, it's been so long, Herrera's hands aren't big but Peña finds suddenly that he can't breathe. He works his hips into it, and groans when Herrera pushes in his second finger, a little too hard, a little too fast.

“You arrested Gilberto,” says Herrera, and if Peña thought he sounded dangerous before—he thought he'd heard Herrera frightening, he thought he'd heard Herrera angry, but this—more than a growl, more than a snarl, something ripped straight from the center of Herrera's chest. Peña is suddenly very glad Herrera can't see his face. He spreads his legs a little wider.

“I did,” he says,

“Who next,” Herrera says. “Who next—Miguel? Me?” A third finger—Peña feels so full. Nothing like the last time someone got their fingers inside him, easy and careful—nothing like the way he fingered Herrera, even, taking his time, laying Herrera out, hoping against hope he would see something on Herrera's face, surprise, desperation. Herrera works his fingers in and out, still too fast for comfort, and hisses in his ear, “You think you're going to get handcuffs on me, Agent Peña? Do you have a plan? A paper trail?”

Peña huffs out a gasp, low, punched-out—Christ, the _feeling_ of Herrera inside him. Herrera's other hand is on his hip, now, his nails digging in. “Tell me,” he says. “Come on, Agent Peña, you gave me safehouses, you gave me Escobar, you can give me this. You arrested Gilberto. You owe me. You owe me, you _owe_ me–” He bites off the end of the sentence.

“God,” says Peña, and groans. He wishes he could see Herrera's face, Herrera's eyes. He says, instead, “What if I don't? What happens then? You walk away?”

For a minute, there's silence, broken by nothing but Peña's own heaving breaths.

After some time, Herrera says, cold, “You've been thinking about this?” He curls up his fingers. Peña makes a noise he didn't know he could, high-pitched and breathy. He feels like he's white-hot where Herrera is fingering him, burning up from the inside out. “Tell me you've been thinking about this, Peña. You wanted me to fuck you—I know how badly you wanted me to fuck you–” He breaks off, his breath uneven. The fingers withdraw, and there's the pop of a bottle opening; Peña can hear slick, wet noises behind him. Herrera's other hand still is gripping his hip so hard it hurts.

When he finally slides in, Peña has to grab on to the kitchen table, bites down hard on his lip. He feels like all the breath has been punched out of him. Above him, Herrera half-laughs, breathless, furious. “I knew,” he says, “I knew, Peña, tell me you wanted it, tell me–”

“I wanted it,” says Peña. Herrera feels—unbelievable, unbelievable inside him, filling him up, fucking him in little shuddering thrusts. His hands curl into fists. “I wanted it, I want it—fuck, harder–”

“You wanted it so _badly_ ,” says Herrera, “it was all you could do not to beg me.” He sounds—wrecked, desperate, worse than he ever did when it was Peña's cock inside him. “You want it harder? Fuck yourself on me.”

Peña does, shamelessly, rocking his hips back. He only manages to do it for a few moments before Herrera makes a low, awful noise and shoves him down; Peña lands on his elbows on the table, presses his forehead to the wood, and gasps and gasps while Herrera fucks brutally into him. His fingers are digging into Peña's hips. Peña thinks, _I'm going to bruise_ , and with the thought feels something well up inside him, a clear and savage satisfaction.

He wraps a hand around himself. He's so hard, so close. Even just a light brush against the head of his cock has him gritting his teeth, clenching around Herrera. “Come on,” he says. “Come on, I'm all yours–”

“Damn right you are,” says Herrera. “You are,” and then, near-broken, “you feel so—Javier, you're so,” and he comes, folding over Peña, his chest against Peña's back, his breath ragged on the back of Peña's neck. Peña closes his eyes, and smiles at the table, and lets the world go white around him.

When he comes back to himself, Herrera has pulled out of him. He's doing up his pants. He isn't looking at Peña.

Peña turns around, leaning against the table, and watches Herrera stop moving. He can't see Herrera's face. He can still feel the echoes of it, that bright and vicious thing inside him, that wild delight. Without quite meaning to, he feels himself smile again.

Maybe Herrera came here to kill him.

He thinks, with some surprise, that he would probably like to kill Herrera first.

Herrera doesn't pull a gun, though, doesn't even move to hit him. Instead, he looks up at Peña, his eyes pale and cold.

“Don't expect to see me again,” he says.

Peña doesn't know what he's meant to say to that. He doesn't get a chance. Herrera is out the door before he can reply.

 

He goes to Curaçao. He flirts with Franklin Jurado's wife. He breaks into Miguel Rodriguez's house. He goes to the jungle again, on a rescue mission.

When he sees Don Berna again, it's like being visited by another life. The air is heavy and humid, the walls close; it swells for a moment, and he can feel everything he felt the night he first went to Montecasino. The blurred time, the waiting death. The way the sky had been like a dome full of stars, trapping him miles beneath any kind of way out.

It swells for a moment—and fades.

Javier finds himself, in a dusty room full of dusty files with the sun beating in through a dusty window five days after they arrest Miguel Rodriguez, of Carrillo.

It's not much of a room. It's not much of a meeting; just him, a couple DEA desk jockeys without any better Saturday afternoon prospects, and a tiny, exhausted-looking Colombian man wearing a suit that looks like it's from before Javi made it to Bogotá. None of them wants to be here, picking through paperwork while the air shifts and the dust swells and starts to choke; none of them can find anywhere else to be.

He'd dreamed, afterwards, that he'd broken into the embassy, climbed in through a window with the streetlights dark and the road empty of cars, and that Carrillo had been there, sitting in one of the hidden safe rooms, lighting a cigarette. That he'd reached out and touched Carrillo's hand, and Carrillo had said, _The Americans took me, and hid me. The coffin was empty. The funeral was a sham._

Then he'd dreamed that he'd gone to Spain, and Carrillo had stared at him and said, _What took you so long?_ , and Javi had said, _There you are. I've been looking all over for you._

Then he'd dreamed that he'd just woken up in his bed, his own bed in Colombia. And next to him, Carrillo had sat up, and put on his shoes, and opened Javi's front door, and walked out into the bright and blinding light.

There's a fan in this room, just behind Javier's neck. He'd known a whore, briefly, who'd rearranged her cheap clothes in her cheap closet every ten days to, she said, “keep things interesting”; the fan seems to be working with the dust on much the same principle. Javier shuffles one form under another, makes a mark with a pencil. The hair at the nape of his neck flutters, as if someone were ruffling it.

The night after the last dream, he'd fucked Herrera less than a block from his house. Old-school, cruising-style, in a public bathroom with the door barred and grime soaking into the knees of his pants. Herrera had gotten his hands in Peña's hair, and Peña had kept his mouth open and his jaw relaxed, and thought about how if Herrera had him followed—if Herrera followed him, if he walked thirty paces behind, and stopped when Peña stopped, and Peña pretended he didn't know—the Cali cartel would know where he lived.

He still doesn't know if Herrera ever told anyone else.

Weeks later, he'd slept the night in Herrera's bed. It's a practice he'd always tried to avoid; nevertheless, he'd woken up a few hours before dawn, the silence outside the windows deafening. He'd almost thought he was in Laredo again.

Herrera had been next to him, sprawled like a lion. He'd blinked his eyes open—even in sleep, nothing about him looked peaceful, just at rest, like still water in the river above the undertow—and pushed himself up and out of bed in one graceful movement, padding to the door. Peña had watched him go, had watched him put his hand on the doorknob, and found his heart suddenly and inexplicably in his throat; had found his mouth open, ready to tell Herrera, _stop_ —to tell him, _come back_.

Herrera had closed the door behind him. Shortly afterwards, there had been the noise of water splashing into a sink.

Peña had put his hands over his mouth carefully, and said into his fingers, “What the fuck.”

Now, years later, they break for lunch. There's a pulpería around the corner that sells beer cheap to Americans; the DEA agents descend on it like flies. Javier ambles behind them, his gun pressing heavy against his waistband. The air is almost breathable down here in the broad street, the heat almost bearable. It's almost as if Escobar and Cali blew away in the wind, long before he arrived. Almost as if they never were at all. Horseshoes and hand grenades.

He buys a pack of Pielrojas and lights one there on the sidewalk, his eyes closed, the sunlight red through his lids. Around him, the trickling crowd parts. He holds the smoke in his mouth, warm and sweet, and blows it gently out.

When he'd come back to his house, that night after the arrest—when he'd come home, and found Herrera there, his eyes wild and his arms and face tight with the promise of violence—he'd thought of Carrillo then, too, though he hadn't known he was thinking it. Thought of the flat blackness of his eyes; thought of how the shadows of his face had moved, in the lights from passing cars. His hands on Javi's jaw, on Javi's back, on Javi's stuttering hips.

There's so much unfinished business, here in Colombia. So much Javi's left undone, or half-done, or done badly. A room full of paperwork, and two men in jail, and the sun still rolling forward, ready to shine on the victims of tomorrow.

He opens his eyes. From a pale wooden chair by a little red table in front of the cafe across the street, Pacho Herrera is watching him.

He looks good. He's wearing a silk shirt, grey and purple, and yellow-tinted glasses; one of his legs is crossed over the other. As Javi watches, he lifts the glass in front of him, a silent salute.

Javier looks at him for a while. Then he nods in return, turns, and begins to push his way back through the crowd.

He never sees Pacho alive again.

 

### EPILOGUE

Weeks later, he drives up into the hills.

The cemetery is deserted, the sky grey and heavy. The bottles of beer are slick with condensation in his fists, and the grass crunches under his feet.

He's panting by the time he reaches the top of the hill. Thinks, _Some cop you are, Agent Peña,_ and realizes he's hearing it in the voice of someone already dead.

The headstone isn't much. He hadn't come to look at it, after the funeral. Hadn't, if he's being honest with himself, wanted to see.

And he may as well be honest with himself. After all, he's tried everything else.

It seems—small. He doesn't know how large it should seem. All the stones look alike from up here, rippling down and down the golden grass, facing the little gravel path that leads to the parking lot. No names. The only break in the tessellation the occasional bouquet of flowers, white and red and pink, and greying where they wither against the ground.

He's the only person here. Him, and the crowds of patient dead.

“I'm sorry I haven't visited before,” he says. “You know how it is.”

Carrillo doesn't say anything.

Javi digs the bottle-opener out of his pocket, sits on the ground, and works the cap off one of the beers. “So,” he says, takes a swig. “Escobar's gone. Somebody probably told you already.” Shakes his head. “We went after Cali, don't know if anyone told you that. Got most of them. Well—put them in jail. I said some things. Maybe they'll stay there.”

He closes his eyes. “I don't think you really give a shit, though,” he says. “You're a body in the ground.”

The wind is kicking up. Around him, the grass rustles.

“I used to wonder,” says Javi, “if I should've told someone. About that kid in the alley. If I should've—maybe you would have been arrested, I don't know. Maybe you would have deserved it. Maybe you'd be alive, maybe Escobar's people would have killed you anyway. Maybe it still would have been my fault. Maybe that kid Herrera killed would've still died. Maybe—” His voice catches, breaks. He drinks again.

“Fuck me,” he says, “maybe I would've gotten to say goodbye.” In the silence of the cemetery, his laugh sounds too-loud, snatched away by the wind to God knows where. “And then everything would be all right. And I'd be—better. And you'd be less dead.”

The wind is in his hair now, his clothes, billowing out his sleeves. He says, “And if you hadn't—shot the kid, or killed Escobar's family, or any of the—hundred things you did, or if you'd done them and I'd seen them and I hadn't,” he shakes his head, “if I hadn't forgiven you, if I hadn't loved you any more, then things would have been better. If I'd had the guts to stop loving you when you didn't deserve it. If you'd been good,” laughter, again, shaky in the stillness, “if I'd been good, if you and I had been good men, if we had tried to be good men, if trying was enough–”

In the distance, over the city, the sky flashes. For only a second, lightning.

The second bottle takes a little longer to open, wet and slippery with condensation. When he finally has the cap in his hand, he lays it on its side, a little more gently than he means to. The foam is white against the dry earth of the grave, the beer trickling out of the neck, none of it in any particular hurry.

“Anyway, I came here to say I'm sorry,” he says, “and I'm going to miss you.”

He feels something wet on his cheek; a raindrop. Another hits his arm, his shoe, the back of his hand.

“But I think,” he says, “I'm not sorry for anything.”

His eyes are stinging. Javier breathes in, breathes out. Climbs to his feet. Around him, the dust is drinking up the rain, slurring into mud. Somewhere deep under it all, the roots of the trees. The air is already beginning to smell clean. He can drive himself home.


End file.
